DIFFERENT
BITS
ARTIFICIAL LIFE:
PART 1 – INTRODUCTION TO GENETIC ALGORITHMS
Have you ever questioned the meaning of “life?” I’m not talking about existentialism
here, but the meaning of the word — life — what it means to be alive? Have you ever
wondered, for example, if there was some way, some possibility, that an electronic
creation (your electronic creation) could one day be deemed alive?
In my experience, definitions of life
tend to raise more questions than
they answer. Countless descriptions
exist from different perspectives and
for different purposes. For example,
the metabolic definition states that living things have the ability to take energy from their environment and change
it from one form to another. The genetic definition focuses on evolution as the
distinctive property of living systems.
The biochemical definition views hereditary information storage in DNA as the
key. Nobel prize-winning physicist
Erwin Schrödinger arrived at what has
been called the “negentropic” definition of life, which observes that living
things export entropy in order to keep
their own entropy at a low level.
Biologists Humberto Maturana
and Francisco Varela coined the
term autopoiesis to describe life as
an autonomous, self-organizing,
and self-producing system.
Similarly, theoretical biologist Stuart
Kauffman defines a living thing as
an autonomous agent, “something
that can both reproduce itself and
do at least one thermodynamic
work cycle.”
Unfortunately for the semanticians, no definition seems to be
satisfactory to everyone. Viruses, fire,
artificial life, and — of course — the
possibility of yet-unknown extraterrestrial life forms, all pose challenges to
potential all-inclusive definitions.
Though some definitions of life
may accommodate the inclusion of
such bizarre organisms as software
algorithms, this idea is generally not greeted with popular accord. In this sense,
artificial life questions the
very meaning of life itself,
forcing us to examine the
basic semantic distinction
between the living and the
non-living. The confusion brings us
back to the fundamental philosophical
debate between Vitalism and
Materialism: Is there, in fact, a “vital
spark” which ignites the living, metaphysically separating it off from the
non-living? Or is life simply a property
of a very complex emergent system?
In my opinion, the confusion
unfolds as a question of medium speci-
FIGURE 1. Image from Ken Rinaldo’s
interactive robotic installation
Autopoiesis. In his own words:
“Autopoiesis is ‘self making,’ a
characteristic of all living systems
which was defined and refined by
Francisco Varela and Humberto
Maturana. The interactivity engages
the viewer/participant who, in turn,
effects the system’s evolution and
emergence. This creates a system
evolution, as well as an overall
group sculptural aesthetic.” (Used
with permission of the artist).
SERVO 03.2008 67
